Calvin Ma's Homebodies, Outside Looking In

When I first saw the card for the Sherrie Gallerie's September show of Calvin Ma, I couldn't wait to see it. When I saw it, I wondered if I hadn't been a little hasty in my enthusiasm. Ma's  Animal Instincts, a show filled with strangely articulated human figures displayed in relation to non-domesticated animals, is very odd.

Both of my reactions, though—one to their silly gaiety; the other to their awkward mystery—seem to be equally important in appreciating this quirky, almost obsessively detailed work. Although "quirky" is inching toward its place as a term of critical approbation, I remain shy of it as an enduing aesthetic concept, or as one that will hold its appeal across the generations.

Calvin Ma, Look Ahead. Ceramic, glaze, stain. 12x5x7".
Courtesy, Sherrie Gallerie

Calvin Ma, detail, Look Ahead

The term "construction" seems better than "sculpture" to fit Ma's works, for they have the exaggerated joints and fittings that marionettes and stuffed toys have. They are figurative but more decorative and abstract than realistic. While the artist has invested infinite care in the manufacture of fine details, that care hasn't been spent creating illusions of visible reality. They may be, however, profoundly realistic, clear delineations of what the inner eye sees. 

Ma exploits the metaphor of eyes as windows. The eyes of many figures rest behind frames and sills, but we're still left to wonder why since the expression is so flat: There seems nothing to protect with an extra layer. If we try to invade the figure's privacy, there appears to be nothing of interest. Those shaded eyes seem to yield neither information nor expression. 

Calvin Ma, figure from Animal Instincts

But it's the inner eye that Ma is about, we can keep looking. On the sides of several figures' heads are more windows and in those we find hidden figures peering out at us obliquely. Their own secret heads are fully formed, and they glance out from positions of hiding.

These unexpected faces peering as it were from secret attics, hidden away where one is certainly not expecting to find them, remind us of the Anne Frank's, the fleeing American slaves, or the millions of others who, over the centuries have been stowed in airless garrets to avoid detection or being overtaken by persecutors.

The heads of Ma's people are in themselves houses: Ma calls them, accurately and poetically, "homebodies."
It's not a stretch to see the people at the side windows as the people trapped inside the artist's head—as those trapped in Everyman's head. Ma personally speaks to the issue of social anxiety and he relates the motivation for this body of work to his reality as a shy person who prefers his inner life to the company of others. He has found a phenomenally accurate and potent way to express a state of feeling. 

Calvin Ma, Stretched Thin. Ceramic, glaze, stain,14x6x9"
Courtesy of the Sherrie Gallerie

Ma's homebodies don't experience the world only through perception, through vision and thought. Several of the figures in the show have, like Stretched Thin, portals where we locate the heart and the guts, other places we all know our anxieties to manifest themselves as turmoil and pain.

The figures in this show are all paired with animals. Their connections are not easy. The people balance tenuously either because they are as awkward as such mechanically jointed people would be, or because there isn't much sympathy between the species. It could be, too, that animals are introverts. They want to be left alone.

Calvin Ma, Falling Behind, detail, fox's
belly below, human figure above.

The detail from "Falling Behind," a piece that shows a fox and a person both falling upside down, reveals a door on the fox's belly. Most of the animals have such openings, but they are posed in ways that obscure them. (Ma is meticulous enough to incorporate such details, even when they are unlikely to be seen.) These suggest, though, that the connection between the humans and the animals may not be in their relationships, but in the idea that all are feral in a primary way. Why does any creature  come out at all? Do society's rewards really live up to the promises made for them? Is our own company so poor or insulting?

Visually, I found this show to be a little tedious. More specifically, I found the extreme attention to detail, repeated so often and sincerely on material of the same size, colors, patterns, and concepts, came close to boring me.

But I think that what I found tedious has turned out to be one of the greatest appeals of Ma's work. With yet a week to go when I saw it, the show was within two works of having completely sold out despite the four-digit price tags. 

The similarities that I though bordered on the bland are probably part of the great appeal Ma's work has had for audiences and purchasers. The repetition of features, shapes, and colors may very well be explained simply by self-portraiture on Ma's part. Then it is simply a way to represent one thing that appears many times. 

Perhaps it's more likely, though, that the lack of dramatic distinction is part of the point. "We all live in our heads. We're top-heavy with anxious thought and views of the world slanted by the oblique views we take from hidden places. We are probably like most others, but fear makes us both big in imagination and small in fact; our senses of proportion are odd."

Calvin Ma, Falling Behind

Which brings me back to close with the "quirky" aspect of Ma's figures. Their look is definitely idiosyncratic. They have a sort of futuristic look from a retro position, which concerns me about possible satisfaction with a camp or short-lived aesthetic. Mitigating against this possible over reliance on "look," though, is Ma's commitment to craftsmanship and materials. 

Ma's workmanship is warmly disciplined: He spares no detail, no matter how many times he must repeat the same stroke on one piece, let alone over a large series. No one labors like this in the interest of a look or style or attitude. One does this for compulsion at the least and conviction at the best; to solve a problem or to unlock a secret; to exorcise pain or to make space for the admission of some discovery. 

Ma is going to travel his road at his own pace, it's clear. I for one can put up with any outcomes in the interest of honest process, full of time to admit what surprises slip in along the way.

Andrew Lidgus: "Duality" at the Sherrie Gallerie

Andrew Lidgus, whose work is showing through August 30 at the Sherrie Gallerie in Columbus, is both a pianist and a fine artist. This may be called a duality, but Lidgus integrates two aspects of an artistic self singularly well in works that themselves defy genre. Neither paintings nor sculptures nor collages, perhaps "assemblage," that generously comprehensive category, comes closest to describing them.

Andrew Lidgus, Points of View, paint, matte board, nails,
 25.5 x19.5" i

All the work in this show simultaneously communicates high spirits and reassuring stability. The assertive color clashes happily; the construction is impeccably disciplined. Lidgus shuns artists' materials, turning to cardboard, carpenters' nails, sandpaper, house paint and other common treasures. His combination of color choices, attentive workmanship, and biomorphic shapes all remind me of mid-twentieth-century art. This may account for an air of classicism I feel strongly in this beautiful work.

From a distance, it's easy to feel the music in a work like Points of View, in which the viewer can find a lyrical line of red dots underscored by a slightly dissonant, broad violet, flowing across the rhythmic beats of black and pink strokes. Green forms have the shape of a grand piano's convex and concave curve and cut.  

The closer one comes, though, the fuller and more distinct the sound, for this isn't just music on a score, but music in dimension, moving into time and space. Some of the red dots are the heads of carpenters' nails, the shadows of which add in every sense another dimension—overtones, a locked hand—to the now separate melodic line. It's a duet, a duality? 

Andrew Lidgus, detail, Points of View

One sees too, close up, that the entire surface of Point of View is in fact created of many stacked planes. It's a topography of heights and it is further complicated by being a topography of colors as well, since the paint doesn't follow the geography of the cut-outs. 

Points of View is a gorgeous, multifaceted work of visual art, one through which any viewer can travel for a long time again and again. But its delight can be multiplied greatly by considering it as an example of interarts, replete with musical content as well. It looks like complex, free music sounds. We can experience this in feeling, in a synthesis of vision and sound.

Lidgus shows a variety of "looks" in Duality, but all of it is strongly related by rhythm, order, and color. Whether he depends on paint with raised elements, whether he works in monotone bas-relief, or in a blend of the two, all fits together to give his body of work tremendous integrity.

Gallery owner Sherrie Hawk has used her excellent eye to highlight this signature fact about Lidgus's work. She has hung the show in a way that not only shows off the beauties of particular works, but which invites the viewer to see similarities that could be lost opportunities in a less sensitive (and educational) hanging.

Andrew Lidgus. In the Privacy of My Mind (left) and Midnight Sky (right).

 

 At first glance the two pieces above may appear dissimilar, since the one is painted and the other is all black, made of primarily woven strips of  matte board. Nevertheless, the proximity of these works feels natural and restful. What makes them work?

Perhaps it's the rounded form toward the top in each piece: The circle on the right and the half circle on the left. Each work is dominated by lines. Though In the Privacy of My Mind repeats the semi-circles, those forms are filled with vertical lines; the circles in Midnight Sky are composed of the grids that fill the work. In the latter work, it appears different that strong oblique lines cut across the surface of the grid, breaking up the simple grid. But the first surface of In the Privacy… is not straight at all, but is built from lines like reeds in the wind, bunched and waving and irregular. In other words, there are enough similarities in design elements and rhythms to relate the two works. Or, rather, to illustrate how Lidgus, whatever the particular piece he's working on, is working from the same intellectual and emotional space, experimenting with integrity from his own soul's stock of material, not working with this finger to the wind.

Andrew Lidgus, In the Privacy of My Mind, wood, paint,
25.5 x 31.5." NB the three-dimensionality.

Most of the works in this show are built on various types of cardboard or matte board. Lidgus uses these both as his basic support and to raise surfaces, whether they be the minute topographical gradations that we see in Points of View or the semi-circles that dominate the surface on In the Privacy of My MInd. Sometimes he uses corrugated cardboard stripped of the paper layer that usually masks the ripples, so that he benefits from the texture of the paper waves. 

Curators (and purchasers) have to be concerned about the durability of "non-traditional" materials. The other side of the coin is the expressive, poetic aspects of those materials. I've already noted Lidgus's workmanship: He is precise in the use of his everyday materials. Cardboard is allowed its own merits in a dignified way I haven't granted before. I find myself admiring its color, which sometimes appears as gold against black; its hard appearance in one setting and softness in another; the effects possible with whole or partial stripping of the surface from corrugation; its sometimes strength and its aspect when it buckles. Lidgus uses cardboard with the seriousness of a model-maker, of a person who is planning, who is in mid-thought, who is conceiving as he works.

Andrew Lidgus, Conscious, detail. NB stripped
corrugated (with metal screen, nails, wire on
sandpaper)

This is my first exposure to Andrew Lidgus, and I find his work fascinating. His composition, colors, and sensibility are classical and hearken back to beautiful moments in Picasso and Matisse as well as to mid-century design. 

But it's his urge to extend mental and material space beyond the usual limits that shows his power. Lifting off to multiple planes without committing to sculpture; finding a way to bring the eye and the ear close together. For Lidgus, proximity isn't a failure to be one or the other, but a unique condition in itself. His works cannot be described or defined as fine art or music; as precious or rough, as sculpture or painting. They are none of these, and they challenge the discussion of art traditions on several levels. 

Duality? This is one concept Lidgus' work seems stoutly to refuse.

Andrew Lidgus, Birdman, matte board, wood, 25.5 x 31.5." How many colors does "black" represent?

Leah Wong Cuts Loose in "360º"

Leah Wong, 2014. Tyvek cutout wall hanging with
ink surface enhancement and shadows. Ca.
35 x 24"

It's been two years since Leah Wong's last show at the Sherrie Gallerie in Columbus. Now, compressed into twenty-four months, 360º demonstrates as much buckle-your-seat-belt, hold-on-to-your-hat, dynamic growth as we'd expect to see over an entire career. It's an adrenaline-powered, breakthrough show. I have a sense that what was latent in her 2012 show, Moving, burst imaginary walls of imagery and rectangular form to hit another stratum of energy. 

The swiftness of change is inspiring; the work itself is thrilling. Wong has presented herself as a painter in the two biannual shows I've seen, but now she shows paper cutting exclusively: small, three-dimensional cut paper tableaux in shadow boxes, and large cutout wall hangings with calligraphic ink drawing on their surfaces—the latter made from durable (and dustable) Tyvek, the same material used in home construction.

Leah Wong, 2014. Small shadow box with
paper cutouts.

Leah Wong, 2014. Small shadow box
with paper cutouts.

In the shadow boxes, Wong positions two or three pieces of cut paper in different planes to create subtle scenes that are heightened by shadow patterns. The fine detail of the cutouts and the shapes they create form vistas of unexpected power over the imagination. These are not pretty arts and crafts decorations for us to flit past. They create mystery and nuance from the density of interlocking forms, shadows cast, and the quiet palette of paper colors—white, black, and taupe.

In  dimensions both small and large, Wong's cutouts have the impetus and spontaneity of freehand drawing. The tendency for viewers of the larger works, especially, is to marvel over the painstaking labor of wielding the X-Acto knife for hour upon hour of precision cutting to produce lacy work on a great scale. And it should be no surprise that we wonder over levels of patience and skill that few of us possess.

Leah Wong, detail of Tyvek wall hanging. NB the
way the surface texture of the material itself has a
gestural quality that supports the energetic
movement of the cutout and calligraphic painting.

But the joy of Wong's work is that this controlled labor results in unfettered, dynamic gestures that zip through space. That the meticulous process results in such freedom and spontaneity in itself fills her work with life and significance. As Wong says in her artist's statement, "I explore the elements of volume, void, the gestures of hand on paper, light and shadow to transform and create new visual possibilities. The open-ended activity creates a conversation between lines and space." Not to mention, a conversation within the viewer, a push and pull of groundedness and yearning.

In the year past, Wong was invited to create two cut-out sculptures for a mall in Shanghai, where she also has a gallery. Workers built the armature, but Wong herself made each enormous piece by hand, the same way she makes every other piece—the shadow boxes and the wall hangings—with an X-Acto knife, cutting spaces with the material spread out across a work table so large that she has to stand on tip-toes to get a sense of how it's shaping up. 

Leah Wong, 2014. Installation in Shaghai, China shopping mall.

Point of comparison: Chinese antique
carved rosewood box show in
Ai Wei Wei's "According to What?"

Why paper cutting? In her exemplary artist's talk at the opening of 360º, Wong explained that this is a traditional Chinese craft practiced by children. Throughout her own childhood, Wong would relax after school by sitting and cutting paper. When she attended China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, her attention was drawn to the foreign, and she undertook oil painting, for which there is nothing comparable in China. After marrying an American, she entered the MFA program at Ohio University as a painter. Faced with every artist's challenge to "know who you are," she struggled, but would relax and reflect by retreating to her childhood pastime of paper and scissors. Perhaps, she discovered, this had something to do with who she was?


Such exuberance, energy, and expansive definition in this work—all driven by heart and a daring spirit. It's highly enjoyable work, but it is much more than pretty. The powerful lines spin the viewer beyond the works' edges, launching us with their momentum into our own explorations, inner or outer.

The "knowing who you are" struck me in another way as I considered the one aggressively three-dimensional work in 360º, "Autumn Sunset." 

Leah Wong, 2914. Installation, Autumn Sunset. Hand cut Tyvek.

 This made me think immediately of the almost ubiquitous Dale Chihuly glass sculptures

Night at the Chihuly Studio, Seattle, Washington. 

suspended over so many museum entry halls, grand galleries, and gardens. In form, color, beauty, and (even without illumination) radiance, there are obvious comparisons to be made.

The Chihuly works are made in industrial workshops. Many artisans craft the elements of these sculptures, which Chihuly then selects and gathers together as a decorator fashions a bouquet. Wong's work develops organically from her own hand and eye. Every element of the sculpture is handmade. The cloud gathers, the sun bursts from her mind and process. So even when she makes similar pieces, the gestures and the energy have to be generated anew, every single time. They are never prefabricated, but discovered as they arise from the artist's vitality.

Will Wong find the force to make these forever? Few artists stay with one process, unchanged by new impulses drawing them in new directions. Wong seems to have a phenomenal fund of stored electrical excitement to be transferred into this work. 

Barbara Vogel's Luminous Portraits

Barbara Vogel, two portraits, digital scans and encaustic, 24 x 12," 2013.
Author photo.

Luminosity is the name of Barbara Vogel's current show at the Sherrie Gallerie in Columbus. It's a show of haunting portraits that are defined by light as much as by more conventional representation. We expect to recognize peoples' features in their portraits. We expect the portrait to be a delineation of the face and body.

In these, however, the features are valleys and pools softly sunken in the auras of the sitters. Whether these subjects generate the light or the light accrues to them is indifferent. It illuminates thought and emotion that too precise and literal a focus would blind us to.

Barbara Vogel, Alex Rose, 24 x 12,"
digital scan and encaustic,
2013. Courtesy of the artist.

Vogel's portraits reveal people through their auras. What features we identify seem like shadows in the depth of luminosity—merely the traces, valleys, and pools of the everyday in something like the soul. While we might recognize people we know, Vogel's soft  focus and veils of light give each face a sober serenity that elevates it beyond the world of commonplace activities and speed.

These images are all the more haunting for their composition and framing. We feel like we are looking at antique tinted photos, or at images arriving from beyond the grave and just achieving substance. Because they are so tightly framed, the faces seem just this side of too big for their constraints. They spring out at the viewer in a way that would be alarming were it not for their benign expressions.

Even in these small, reproduced images, one can see the vertical lines that run through the works. They result from Vogel's unique process: She does't photograph her subjects, but she scans them, using a hand-held wand scanner. Because it's an implement designed to be used on books and flat materials, the portrait-sitters stand behind a piece of glass along which the artist passes the scanner. The portraits are printed, then painted with encaustic (melted beeswax infused with pigment). The surfaces retain ghost striations from the scanner and surface traces from the application of wax, which cools in patterns that follow or move athwart the scanner's direction.

Barbara Vogel, row of portraits, 24 x 12," digital scan and
encaustic, 2013. Author photo.

In another body of work, Vogel uses her Hasselblad camera with traditional color film to take slightly out-of-focus, portraits with shallow depth of field. These small, square photographs are also covered with encaustic, which adds to their other-worldly, unattainable quality.

Of both sets of work, Vogel writes in her statement of their "mystery and intimacy."
I find them mysterious, but the effect on me of the lack of definition is the opposite of intimacy: I find their inscrutability distancing in a poignant way—indeed, I find them unknowable as ghosts of people who were once familiar.

In Vogel's photographic portraits, the environments in which her subjects are portrayed are ordinary, domestic settings. The sitters have been captured informally, going about their business on normal days. Were the pictures less obscure, would we find the portraits more interesting? Would we take more interest in the subjects, or learn more about them? Where would greater visual clarity get us? I'm not sure that visual focus would deliver as much information about the individuals as their retreating images do.

Barbara Vogel, Dad, 2013. Color photograph with encaustic.
Courtesy of the artist.

The image of Dad, the old man in his wheelchair, says a great deal about the subject in its composition and fuzzy focus. His dark chair and dark form are visually an extension of the shadow that cuts across the lower portion of the frame: In how much longer will he be entirely swallowed by darkness?—a question that he must know he's facing, with the sun behind him, placing him in dark silhouette against a lively pink world. His hands clutch one another in a gesture of patience or resignation. His body has shrunken until it is barely the size of the wheelchair: He has to lift his elbows to the armrests. The gates appear gigantic behind him.

Yet Dad's presence is near the center of the composition, and it is the most complex form in the picture; everything else revolves around it, no matter how wizen or obscure the person has become. Fading away, hard to reach, the elderly father remains hard to define, yet central.

Barbara Vogel, Liz, 2013, Color photograph with encaustic.
Courtesy of the artist.

Liz is another photographic portrait sharing the virtues of Dad. Again, Vogel's composition is wonderful. She divides the square vertically into halves of light and dark demarcated by a ragged line. The window, though is in the "dark" side, behind the sitter, and casting her into shadow. The light on the left seems to be reflection in glass that separates us from her; the whiteness of the reflection obscures her face even more than the shadow does.

The sitter is, again, squarely in the middle of the composition, this time looking directly at us, but the shadow and glare prevent us from seeing her features. She does nothing to hide, but circumstances render her wholly obscure. Is she in her own space? Is that a calendar on the wall, mirroring the shape of the window? 

We can't be sure of the age of this sitter, but the portrait's theme of mortality seems related to Dad's. The movement of light and shadow relate not only to the person, but to the life. This girl or woman has a quality of stillness that resembles suspension, like one sees in bottled, preserved zoological materials. If she's alive, will she live? Are the shadows closing in on her, or is the light advancing?

Barbara Vogel, Dale, Brent, and Ernie, 2013.
Color photograph with encaustic. Courtesy of the artist.

A couple of the works in Luminosity are composed in a manner familiar to anyone who's walked by the windows of commercial photographers specializing in family portraits. Dale, Brent, and Ernie fill the frame of their cheerfully-decorated, well-lit interior. They pose in pleasingly descending size, from standing, through sitting, to obliging little pet advancing a paw.

In the presence of such portraits, I usually feel manipulated in conflicting ways. On the one hand, the photographer is inviting me into the happy group. It appears so wide open, congenial, and normal. The portrait is about their agreeableness.

On the other hand, it's a triumphant picture. Placed in such a setting, how could one fail to be anything but agreeable? The smiles aren't friendly—they're satisfied. You, the viewer are not in the picture, and that's the point.

Dale, Brent, and Ernie plays with this genre of portrait by pushing everything away—the sitters and their environment both—as if they were not merely out of focus, but were receding. The brightness of the window and the illumination around the edges of the painting call our eyes to the back, and we move the foreground people back with our glances. "Everything is good," it seems to suggest, "except for the inexplicable force that won't permit us to believe this picture."

Barbara Vogel's show runs through November 9 at the Sherrie Gallerie in Columbus. It is so worth seeing: Until you are eye-to-eye with these portraits—the scanned ones especially—it's hard to understand how they can affect your heart; how they draw the viewer into the space between physical and spiritual presence. It's a big space.

In the Muranese Fashion: New Glass from Mattia and Marco Salvadore

Current work by Mattia and Marco Salvardore of
 StudioSalvadore, at the Sherrie Gallerie
 in Columbus, through July 31, 2013.

In March of 2012, I was introduced to the astonishing work of Muranese master glass artist Davide Salvadore at the Sherrie Gallerie in Columbus. This summer, Sherrie Hawk is showing work from his sons, Mattia and Marco, who work cooperatively at their Studio Salvadore in Murano. Murano is the traditional island site of Venetian glass works, where today's techniques have continuously developed since the 16th century.

The Salvadore brothers' sculptures capture color and light, transferring to them the molten look their medium once had, when it emerged super-heated from the kiln. The artists concentrate on a few forms—simple, graceful elliptical shapes ideal for framing the layered currents of color that swim through their depths.

Those colors are, in fact, one of the first things that caught my eye as I looked through the room toward the large front window, the natural source of illumination for all the work. The palettes are fresh and, above all, struck me as young. Young: as in springlike (leaf green, sky blue, buttercup yellow), but also as in hip. 

Mattia and Marco Salvadore, Opera 13. 
Blown and carved glass.

A signature of Studio Salvadore is swathes of color encased in transparent glass with large murrine applied on the surface. Murrine are the slices from canes the glassmaker forms for this purpose. Disks cut from the canes will make beautiful, circular decorations, all alike—like filled cookies cut from a roll. The Salvadores apply murrine at the end of the glassblowing process, so they sit boldly on the surface of the vessel. The small variations in size have to do with distortions consequent on working with high temperature materials.

Detail of murrine on Opera 13

The application of murrine is not the last step of decoration. Once the piece is entirely cool, then its surface is carved. This step is yet another opportunity for the worker to make the slip that would destroy so labor- and technique-intensive a work of art. These pieces are highly vulnerable to error and serendipity at every step of the process. They requires the artist's confident and unerring hand at all stages, from super-heated fluid to rock-like solid. I wonder how many pieces like the ones in this show are attempted for each one realized?

I'll return to my perception of the youthful air about Studio Salvadore's work. Fashionable is the word that actually describes the feeling I have about this body of work. The fact that nearly all of the work is similar in size, shape, and distinctive motif brings to mind an up-to-the-minute, fresh fashion collection presented on the elegant curves of uniform models. The colors and their satiny flourishes within the vessels give the air of draped or folded fabrics. This effect is spectacularly enhanced by the details of carving. In Opera 13, the horizontal surface waves atop the lime green give the effect of a pleated, silken sash. 

Opera 5 is the most translucent piece in the Sherrie show. Its swirling, interlocked patterns of

Mattia and Marco Salvadore, Opera 5. 
Blown and carved glass.

carved surface designs respond to the movement and shapes of the color designs. On top of the simpler areas of pale violet, though, the carving gives the feeling that quilting stitches do on fabric. The effect is not that we necessarily focus on the troughs left where glass has been excised. Rather, their edges define soft spaces in the way that quilting stitches define and gently gather tiny pouches of fabric. I see that this is similar to the effect of stitchery on fine, sheer fabric. Not only does the extra surface detail add the beauty of subtle design, but it piques with the illusion of transparency. Perhaps we could see through this were it not for those marks? There is a seductive element created by the intersection of translucence and the fine shadowy marking of the carved or stitched lines. 

Opera 5 is high fashion in its sensuous, seductive use of color and pattern; design elements subtle and bold; and materials the hand can barely resist caressing. It has the sex appeal that makes you want to get closer, and the attitude of couture that enforces distance as part of its allure.

Mattia and Marco Salvadore, Opera 8. 
Blown and carved glass.

Gazing at this beautiful show, then, from the back of the room, is like enjoying the pages of Italian Vogue, or enjoying a Fashion Week party in Milan, Paris, or New York. It is fresh, beautiful, new, and exciting. A wonderful show of exquisite glass!

I mention a vantage point from the back of the room not only for the view into the dazzling grouping of Studio Salvadore glass, but also because there sit on display three pieces remaining from the elder Salvadore's spring 2012  Sherrie Gallerie show.

At the time, I was disconcerted by Davide Salvadore's show because very little of his work looked like glass. His works tend to have matte surfaces which, while minutely and brilliantly decorated, nevertheless appear to be made of inlaid wood or leather. His forms, too, are unconventional, having the appearances of imagined musical instruments or dreamed "ancient" vessels. If the sons' sculptures are sleek,  young, and stylish, the father's seem almost curmudgeonly in their astonishingly wrought singularity.

Davide Salvadore, detail.
Blown and carved glass.

Mattia and Marco learned their art in their father's studio, Campanol e Salvadore, when they were boys. Both have worked with other masters since, both in Murano and at the famous Pilchuck School in Washington state. It is still clear that their father's influence is deep, being on the surface of the work shown here.

Exquisite glass carving is clearly a shared characteristic. Because the sons are more interested in allowing light to travel through their glass, they use carving almost as another color element, or as an enhancement to the directional flow of color. Because Davide's presentations are nearly always opaque, carving is exterior enhancement. He uses it more architecturally than his sons do.

Both generations apply murrine to the exteriors of their works rather than incorporating it into the hot glass. What different expressions result from the same technique though. The detail from Davide's fantastical instrument shows tightly focused murrine placed in double pairs for an almost classical look. This couldn't be more different from the sons' large, loose, urban tribal tattoos.

Davide Salvadore. Blown and carved
glass.

Sherrie's show of Mattia and Marco Salvadore glass provides a heavenly hour for any person with eyes to see. It is a trip to Paradise. That such pure sensual gratification is generated by so technique-heavy, physically demanding an art form is breathtaking, even as a concept. For the Salvadore brothers to bring us such light and elegant work is most artful indeed.

But their show is enriched for all of us by the three pieces of their father's that remain in the wings. Davide Salvadore's work seems to come from a different planet—the planet perhaps farthest away from youth: Age. The complex uncompromisingness of the elder's work; its depth of concept and design; the visionary quality to his use of materials: All this hearkens to experience with glass and with life too. The strange formality of his work lends a darkness to them that appeals to me. They are not only wonders of process and aesthetics, but repositories of experiences I don't have to know to connect to.

Not that this isn't true for the work from Studio Salvadore. But I am older now. I love beauty, color, youth and fashion. I love especially what I know will continue to sustain me, and I turn to art for this. I embrace especially work that I have to think about before I fall in love with it—the odd or rough, the characteristic, troubling, or off-kilter. Often I find that works with these qualities keep me coming back because they always have more to offer. I may not always "like" them, but I always have a conversation with them about something important. Those conversations may change from month to month, but they don't stop. It doesn't hurt if the works are beautiful, but they don't have to be. They have to keep talking and challenging, though. And they have to bear the deep, indelible mark of their individual maker.

___________________________________________________________
All photography by the author, with thanks to the Sherrie Gallerie.

Porcelain of the Possessed: Julie Elkins at Sherrie Gallerie

Julie Elkins, Lily Can't Sleep. Porcelain and porcelain stains. Author photo.
Note tiny bed in midst of rubble at top of the sculpture.

Julie Elkins' porcelain is positively weird. It's the sort of thing that stops you in your tracks, sets your jaw dangling in disbelief, and your eyes scanning the corners for secret cameras: "Is this a joke?" Elkins' current show at the Sherrie Gallerie in Columbus, due to close the week after Thanksgiving, is full of late-October, perilous, gothic exaggerations: abandoned, derelict buildings; deep earth packed with mortal remains; lonely shacks shuddering in the wind; and spooky, talking tree stumps of the rotted, Halloween sort. And yet, here we are in the gallery of Joe Bova and the sublime Davide Salvatore. On the other hand, we are alerted that we are in for something different here. The name of the show is, "Misadventures of a Ceramic Artist Lost in Paradise."

If at first the visitor is surprised to see work that resembles set designs or storyboards for animations, they wouldn't be far off. Elkins is a story-teller who doesn't write, but who compresses her imaginings, which spring from the world observed around her, into one artifact at a time. Not an artist to work in the tradition of her material, Elkins brings her materials to her own narrative purposes. But if you insist on on the functional soul of ceramics and serve canapés off Lily Can't Sleep, then you've probably found a kindred soul in this artist.

Lily Can't Sleep, detail of room construction.
Author photo.

Elkins is a miniaturist on a monumental scale. In Lily Can't Sleep, above, she not only represents an abandoned, destroyed bedroom, down to the details of lathe behind the broken plaster wall, structural uprights behind the lathing, and the exterior wall executed brick by brick, but she has also articulated each element of the rubble, the precarious, post-disaster earth on which the ruin stands, and a blasted, anthropomorphized tree, clinging for dear life to the fragile world. Not only is the detail of the work awe-inspiring, but so is the feat of cantilevered work, miraculously stable despite its apparent will to fall over.

Lily Can't Sleep, detail of rubble.
Author photo

Elkins brings to her work in ceramics a willingness to tell stories in any medium available to her:  "I'm good at telling stories; I want to pull them from life wherever I see people interacting." As a child, she liked to draw people. This interest was continued when, as a teen, her father presented her with sections of a felled cherry tree and she learned how to use wood-burning equipment to draw portraits into the wood slabs. She is also a puppeteer, used to putting on silent plays that she and her husband devise—they write the scripts and make the puppets.

Julie Elkins, Yolandi the Sea Witch. Stoneware and stains.
Author photo.

Yolandi, detail. Author photo.

Elkins is currently making busts, like Yolandi, the Sea Witch, covered with barnacles. It's a life-size work—like all of hers,  fabulously detailed. The face is so life-like that I asked her if there's a model, and it seems that there is, though there was not a sitter. The face is based on images of a singer Elkins admires. "I was hoping to find a Muse," she explains, so she decided that being a fan was close enough. It seems to have worked, for even with all the fantastical elements—the crazed skin at the scalp line; the huge accretion of barnacles; the eyes without pupils—the face is almost disconcertingly easy to engage with. 

Most of the work in Elkins' show is black and white. It is not glazed because the weight of glazes would overpower and fill in the extreme delicacy of her manipulations. The stain she uses is pure pigment mixed with clay body, rubbed into the clay. Black is the color she has chosen, not a default.

Julie Elkins, The Factory. Porcelain and porcelain stain, acrylic
paint. Author photo.
Note the two mouths, left and right, beneath the surface.

When she uses color, though, the contrast heightens the inherent drama of the work. The Factory is an astonishing piece on every level, and the use of minutely painted graffiti on the walls of the abandoned industrial building underscores Elkins' ability to place high realism (the extreme, accurate detail) in an imagined, symbolic environment (a cut-away of the Earth, which speaks, being filled with the bones of the dead.) Her observations are so keen, so many, and so precisely rendered as to provide unusually secure grounding for the rest of the scene that she imaginatively posits. There is a conviction to her imagination that she really doesn't have to sell us; we are sold by her attention to the normal, the scenes that all of us see every day.

Mouth and bones in the earth beneath The Factory. 
Detail photo by the author.

Elkins is working in Key West, Florida, where she and her husband moved via a masted sixty-foot canoe when things went south for them in Richmond, Virginia. Their two-and-a-half month trip on the Intercoastal Waterway provided considerable grist for her imaginative mill, one that was already convinced about the reality of ghosts and metaphysical realities.

Julie Elkins, Strong Wind, Earth, and Sky. Porcelain and
porcelain stain. Author detail photo.

That habit of mind permeates Elkins' work, which, the busts excepted, is entirely depopulated. What she gives us are ruins, abandoned buildings, and these set in such a way that we are mindful of their connections to the earth—the collector of our bones and absorber or our detritus. So while she does not present us with figures in her scenes, the human presence is felt everywhere in her work. Lily who is not in her bedroom haunts the remaining space; as do the people who used to keep the factory working when we were an industrial country; or whoever occupies the lonely shack situated between Strong Wind, Earth, and Sky. 

Even with the suggestion that humans do not move alone on the planet—that trees have arms and the earth itself can speak—Elkins' fanciful world strikes me as a  place of comfort. Even through bleak scenes, spirits stir to suggest that wherever humans have been, heat and heart remain. It's certain that whatever Elkins puts her dedicated hand to is animated by just those qualities.

Julie Elkins, detail from Beasties. Porcelain and porcelain stain. Author photo.